Your Humble Scribe

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

I wouldn't do that if I were you ...

On this day in 1939, the Soviet Red Army -- probably on direct orders from the Politburo -- shelled one of their own villages on the Karelian Isthmus and immediately began pointing fingers at Finland.

Four days of intense Soviet propaganda later, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- in a tactic that had served him so well previously in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- sent his troopies over the Finnish border.

Unfortunately, most of what Uncle Josef managed to do was severely irritate a large part of the population of Finland in general, and a certain five-foot, three-inch skinny little farmer in particular.

Over the next three-ish months -- 30NOV1939 to 13MAR1940 -- the 250,000 grunts of the Finnish military faced off against 1,000,000 (one million) Soviet soldiers.

There are numerous scholarly works explaining the results -- the Soviet officer corp was still recovering from one of Uncle Josef's little purges; Finnish tactics were simple (Charge!) and flexible; the Soviet armies being used were drawn from the south of the Soviet Union and weren't really accustomed to brawling in -40 degree weather; and the Finns quite happily cheated (a favourite target of Finnish attacks and artillery barrages was the Soviet field kitchens. Nothing wrecks morale quite like never, ever seeing a hot meal during 90+ days of fighting in Arctic weather.)

Whatever the reason, the Finnish military (metaphorically-speaking. Sort of.) hauled off and place-kicked the Soviet Red Army right in the wedding tackle and kept on punting until they were dragged, kicking and screaming, to the peace table on March 12, 1940 -- 105 days after the Soviets started the whole thing -- to sign a brutal and dishonourable cessation of hostilities.

Soviet casualties were almost 400,000 men dead, wounded and missing; with another 5,600 POWs. They managed to inflict less than 70,000 dead and wounded on the Finns, with only about a thousand Finnish POWs.

And that skinny farmer? Well, he picked up his iron-sighted Finnish copy of the Mosin-Nagant M28, sewed himself an oversuit of white bedsheets, and (with the occasional judicious application of a KP-31 submachine gun) proceeded to personally turf between 500 and 700 Soviet solders in front of Saint Peter's desk until 06MAR1940 when a Red counter-sniper got lucky and put Simo Häyhä out of the fight for the rest of the (all-too-brief) war.

That averages out to about five enemy personnel a day for 100 continuous days. With iron-sights.

While Finland ultimately lost the Winter War that was started this day, 69 years ago, the cost of that defeat was best summed up by a Soviet general officer, who later stated: "We gained just enough land to bury our dead."

22 comments:

The Finns also used a US Plane that was said by many US pilots to be worthless and shot the Sov AF into ribbons. The Brewster Buffalo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Buffalo was that plane. It's never the tool that wins it's the men who use it.

Fascinating that, after having half his face shot off by the countersniper and taking years to recuperate, he went on to become a moose hunter and dog breeder, finally passing away in 2002 at 96 years of age. A worthy end to a worthy soldier.

The official records say Häyhä got 542 kills (after he said that he had over one hundred kills his battalion commander gave an order that another soldier must verify the kills to make sure he's not just making stuff up).

And I'd like to point out that the war wasn't as easy as you make it sound like. Our troops were exhausted near the end of the war. I'd also like to point out that most of the Finnish communists fought bravely on our side because they knew that Stalins attack was pure agression (despite the fact that soviets had said that they'll only defend whats theirs and never attack others...) so this war actually united Finland and helped us put aside some crudges people still had after our civil war.

Lawdog: Some Americans (of Finnish extraction) fought for Finland in the Winter War. I had the good fortune to know one of them. He didn't talk about it much but the few stories I did hear were interesting.

I wrote the book "Rifles of the White Death". Nikita Kruchev said the Soviets lost 1,000,000 dead. It is a great story of bravery and the underdog winning in the end. Finland was never occupied by the USSR.

I was fortunate to have had lunch with Simo Häyhä not once but twice (Sept. 2000 and May 2001). He was still sharp as a tack and had quite a goood sense of humor (he even flirted a bit with my wife, Desiree).